ting and tearing cruel. The
odds was all that Woodstock Wizard III was going to be killed; I had
fought enough to see that: but not knowing the rules of the game among
champions, I didn't like to interfere between two gentlemen who might be
settling a private affair, and, as it were, take it as presuming of me.
So I stood by, though I was shaking terrible, and holding myself in like
I was on a leash. But at that Woodstock Wizard III, who was underneath,
sees me through the dust, and calls very faint, "Help, you!" he says.
"Take him in the hind leg," he says. "He's murdering me," he says. And
then the little Miss Dorothy, who was crying, and calling to the
kennel-men, catches at the Red Elfberg's hind legs to pull him off, and
the brute, keeping his front pats well in Jimmy's stomach, turns his big
head and snaps at her. So that was all I asked for, thank you. I went up
under him. It was really nothing. He stood so high that I had only to
take off about three feet from him and come in from the side, and my
long "punishing jaw," as mother was always talking about, locked on his
woolly throat, and my back teeth met. I couldn't shake him, but I shook
myself, and every time I shook myself there was thirty pounds of weight
tore at his wind-pipes. I couldn't see nothing for his long hair, but I
heard Jimmy Jocks puffing and blowing on one side, and munching the
brute's leg with his old gums. Jimmy was an old sport that day, was
Jimmy, or Woodstock Wizard III, as I should say. When the Red Elfberg
was out and down I had to run, or those kennel-men would have had my
life. They chased me right into the stables; and from under the hay I
watched the head groom take down a carriage-whip and order them to the
right about. Luckily Master and the young grooms were out, or that day
there'd have been fighting for everybody.

Well, it nearly did for me and the Master. "Mr. Wyndham, sir," comes
raging to the stables. I'd half killed his best prize-winner, he says,
and had oughter be shot, and he gives the Master his notice. But Miss
Dorothy she follows him, and says it was his Red Elfberg what began the
fight, and that I'd saved Jimmy's life, and that old Jimmy Jocks was
worth more to her than all the St. Bernards in the Swiss
mountains--wherever they may be. And that I was her champion, anyway.
Then, she cried over me most beautiful, and over Jimmy Jocks, too, who
was that tied up in bandages he couldn't even waddle. So when he heard
that